M is for Mommy (and Missi): Yom Teruah

Sunday, September 28, 2014

Yom Teruah – AKA Feast of Trumpets

Leviticus 23 lists God’s feasts – not the Jews’ feasts, God’s feasts. (Lev 23:2) We just celebrated Yom Teruah. Scripture doesn’t tell us a lot about what to do on this day, but we are always excited to celebrate.

The Spring feasts are remembrance of past events, but the Fall feasts have not yet been fulfilled. So, we can only make an educated guess as to the meaning. Some of the scriptures about Yom Teruah are:

Lev 23:23-25

²³Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, ²⁴“Speak to the children of Israel, saying: ‘In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall have a sabbath-rest, a memorial of blowing (teruah) of trumpets, a holy convocation. ²⁵You shall do no customary work on it; and you shall offer an offering made by fire to the Lord.’”

Num 29:1-6

‘And in the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall have a holy convocation. You shall do no customary work. For you it is a day of blowing (teruah) the trumpets.²You shall offer a burnt offering as a sweet aroma to the Lord: one young bull, one ram, and seven lambs in their first year, without blemish. ³Their grain offering shall be fine flour mixed with oil: three-tenths of an ephah for the bull, two-tenths for the ram, ⁴and one-tenth for each of the seven lambs; ⁵also one kid of the goats as a sin offering, to make atonement for you; ⁶besides the burnt offering with its grain offering for the New Moon, the regular burnt offering with its grain offering, and their drink offerings, according to their ordinance, as a sweet aroma, an offering made by fire to the Lord.

There is a lot of detail about the offerings to be made, but since there is no temple at this time, we can’t do those. Other than that, we know we are to rest, and to make a teruah - alarm, signal, sound of tempest, shout, shout or blast of war or alarm or joy.

So, that's what we make sure to do. We rest - my hubby doesn't go to work, we don't do chores or housework. And, we make a teruah.

We make a teruah with trumpets and shouting and other noise makers.

We make a teruah for quite a while.

This year a friend was just arriving as we started our teruah in the back yard. She said she could hear us loud and clear down the street, so we must have been doing a good job.